Video Ads Analysis - YouTube vs. Facebook

After running our ads for about a week we can see the following results:

YouTube video posts (link)

Our YouTube video posts got a nice amount of engagement with over 20 reactions (such as “likes”) each. Overall engagement was 237 averaging $0.29 per engagement. These likes are valuable for creating credibility for our page and posts but don’t seem very effective for inviting people to like our page. 

Our YouTube channel did see a rise in activity starting on October 17th with the commencement of this ad campaign. Each of the three videos rose by a few views and the channel gained one subscriber. While this cannot be considered a very effective method for growing a YouTube channel, it did work. 

Facebook video posts (organic uploaded to Facebook)

The videos uploaded directly to Facebook got a lot less reactions, but much more overall engagement. The average cost per engagement was only $0.01! There seems to be some ambiguity around how Facebook defines engagement for videos in the ad manager. 

When looking at the original post details on our page we can see that the Tesla video for example got 29 clicks to play and 2 likes but no other forms of engagement are indicated. Whereas if we look at the ad manager there are more than 1000 engagements on that same video just from one ad set. After taking a look at the documentation my best assessment is that the engagement in the ad manager is mostly 3 second or more views from autoplay.

One of our ads was rejected. The reason was because of “Use of our brand assets”. This most probably refers to the small Facebook logo on the thumbnail. 

Conclusions:

Overall for both campaigns we got much better results for our website lookalike audience then with Chinese speakers in the US. This may indicate that website lookalike is a useful audience defining tool, but also may be a result of the sheer difference in audience size. 

Depending on what our goals are, different video ads should be chosen. If we want more visible reactions to our posts, and visits to our YouTube channel - we should use the YouTube video posts. On the other hand, if we have content that we want to reach the eyes of the most people, for the cheapest price, Facebook videos is the way to go.